153 Quotes by A. N. Wilson

In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity - or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity - by being opinionated rather than by being learned.

Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.

I was once naïve enough to ask the late Duke of Devonshire why he liked the town of Eastbourne. He replied with a self-deprecating shrug that one of the things he liked was that he owned it.

A busybody’s work is never done.

Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness – perhaps unimaginative of me.

The Royal Family are not like you and me. They live in houses so big that you can walk round all day and never need to meet your spouse. The Queen and Prince Philip have never shared a bedroom in their lives. They don’t even have breakfast together.

The extreme paradox arose that one of the most passionate, expressive, humorous and unconventional women who ever lived was paraded before the public as a stiff, pompous little person, the ‘figurehead’ to an all-male imperial enterprise. This.

Kingsley wrote to Maurice, ‘They find that now they have got rid of an interfering God – a master-magician, as I call it – they have to choose between the absolute empire of accident, and a living, immanent, ever-working God.’21 To another correspondent, an atheist, he wrote, ‘Whatever doubt or doctrinal Atheism you and your friends may have, don’t fall into moral atheism. Don’t forget the Eternal Goodness, whatever you call it. I call it God.’22.

If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn’t eat lunch.